Archiv vom November 2013

The unusually dark and violent Rise of the Guardians made me wonder if Dreamworks Animation had lost its touch, but with their next movie, The Croods, the studio really made up for it. Despite being the Aardman movie that wasn’t and a production delay for about a year, the movie turned out amazingly well and embodies everything that the studio stands for: a solid story, great characters and wonderful animation. This is more than just a run-of-the-mill cave-family-movie, it’s an entirely fresh and original take on a simple idea. The DVD release is a bit of a disappointment, tough – the distributor switch from Paramount to Fox apparently means that Dreamworks has given up on the commentary track, but at least the movie looks as good as possible and there are even some deleted scenes as extras.

He was one of the truly great ones of Germany’s political cabaret – last night, Dieter Hildebrandt sadly died at the age of 86. Only yesterday there were reports that he was gravely ill, before he seemed almost indestructible and had been on stage until quite recently. Although his presence was limited to German-speaking audiences, I’m writing this article in English to give everyone an impression how great his influence had been. So far there has been only one English-language obituary about him, but he also deserves to be recognized outside of Germany.

When I finally bought Dreamworks’ latest two animated movies, Rise of the Guardians and The Croods on DVD, I assumed that both would follow the long tradition of the studio of having an Audio Commentary with the filmmakers as one of the extras, but only the first movie had one. It seems that the distributor switch from Paramount to 20th Century Fox had one unfortunate casualty – the commentary track, an extra which had been around even longer than the DVD itself, going back almost to the 1980s with the emergence of the laserdisc and the capability of storing more than one soundtrack on an audiovisual medium. In today’s article in lieu of a dvd review, I’m looking at the probable fate of the audio commentary and introduce some of my favourite commentary tracks.

Dreamworks has had a lot of success with their animated movies and so far I loved almost all of their movies with some exceptions. I had high hopes for Rise of the Guardians, but it turned out that their collaboration with children’s books author William Joyce is one of their rare failures. While the movie has an amazing concept, great characters and voices and dazzling visuals, the story is disappointingly weak and a surprising amount of violence makes this feel not like a Dreamworks movie at all. In today’s somewhat longer-than-usual review, I tried to get to the bottom of what went wrong with Rise of the Guardians. This final joint DVD release from Dreamworks and Paramount is, however, absolutely fine and while some extras from the Blu-Ray are missing, the most interesting material has been ported over.

The rescue comes, however, at a cost – the show will not be broadcast on BBC1 anymore, instead the first showing is relocated to BBC4 with a later repeat on BBC2. Given that The Sky At Night is broadcast on Sunday after midnight at the moment, this may be an improvement and the home on BBC4 is not altogether bad, because the repeats of the 30-minute-version have already aired on this channel for some time. The shorter 20-minute version, which was always broadcast first, will also be abandoned in favour of the 30-minute format. This can be a great chance for The Sky at Night – hopefully the inevitably lower ratings will not prompt the BBC to cancel the program for good.

The announcement was also paired with the news that The Sky At Night will make a pause in January to make way for a fourth round of Stargazing Live with Brian Cox and Dara O Briain, which has been credited to create a huge public interest in astronomy and will surely be as amazing as in the previous years.

The next regular episode of The Sky at Night with the Moore Moon Marathon,will be aired this Sunday (actually Monday) at 0:30 GMT on BBC1 with the 30-minute-version first airing on BBC4 on Thursday at 19:30 GMT. For more repeats check the official website of the program.